Funding for the Corporation for Public Broadcasting would be cut to zero, and the National Endowment for the Arts and the National Endowment for the Humanities would be eliminated entirely, the first time any president has proposed such a measure.

The spending outline is what White House Budget Director Mick Mulvaney calls a “hard-power budget,” with spending increases for defense and homeland security at the expense of many other programs in the discretionary budget items.

We asked the following question : “Can we continue to ask a coal miner in West Virginia or a single mom in Detroit to pay for these programs?”
“The answer was no. We can ask them to pay for defense and we will, but we can’t ask them to continue to pay for the Corporation for Public Broadcasting.”

In a statement, CPB President and CEO Patricia Harrison said, “There is no viable substitute for federal funding that ensures Americans have universal access to public media’s education and informational programming and services.” She called public media “one of America’s best investments,” costing “approximately $1.35 per citizen per year.”

Courtesy of CANandUSPolitics/posts/

Some comments from Jerry:

Mulvaney’s argument doesn’t compute. Firstly, it seems ridiculous to state that the coal miner and single mom shouldn’t have to pay for Public Broadcasting when the costs is a paltry $1.35 (or thereabouts) per citizen per year.
More importantly, Mulvaney is pissing up a rope when he says that the above-mentioned people will be asked to pay for defense.

It can be argued, though that access to PBS might strengthen and expand the educational and knowledge “quotients” (for lack of a better word) of the average citizen.

It actually behooves Trump and his surrogates to keep the nation as uneducated as possible because it is precisely that lack of education which breeds the ignorance among the population that got Trump elected in the first place. Only a less ignorant and better-informed electorate can make intelligent choices and the military spending increases anticipated by this budget will do nothing to increase the opportunity for this hopefully more enligtened citizenry to emerge at any time soon. As a matter of fact the opposite will happen as Trump continues to sell the Excited States a bill of goods.